BookTweets

A report by Rob Lloyd on the second BookTalk of the 2015/16 season, which took place on 9 Dec 2015: an exploration of Khaled Hosseini’s debut best-seller, The Kite Runner, to coincide with Human Rights Day.

It seems that the only people who were not fans of the book were Hosseini’s Afghan compatriots in America. On the internet he was called ‘another Salman Rushdie’, and the Afghan community in northern California attacked him in the press and on the radio. ‘It was quite scathing,’ he says, eating sweetmeats and drinking tea in the back garden of his home in San Jose, where he has lived for the past 27 years.

Like this:

I remembered the day on the hill I had pelted Hassan with pomegranates and tried to provoke him. He’d just stood there, doing nothing, red juice soaking through his shirt like blood. Then he’d taken the pomegranate from my hand, crushed it against his forehead. Are you satisfied now? he’d hissed. Do you feel better? I hadn’t been happy and I hadn’t felt better, not at all. But I did now. My body was broken—just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later—but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.

In Afghanistan, you don’t understand yourself solely as an individual,” he says. “You understand yourself as a son, a brother, a cousin to somebody, an uncle to somebody. You are part of something bigger than yourself. The things that happen within families … I’m so fascinated by how people destroy each other and love each other.